I step inside | letting the door thud shut.
Making its very ordinariness seem sincerity:
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on, I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone and little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut for Sunday, brownish now. Some brass and stuff up at the holy end; the small neat organ; and a tense, musty, unignorable silence, brewed God knows how long.
Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Ordinary prose, or almost so, since awkward reverence is preparing us for the third stanza, which starts:
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
And by the final stanza the language is much more elevated − blent, robed in destinies, hunger in himself, gravitating, ground, wise in, dead lie round − and the assiduous student of rhetoric could identify:
Parenthesis: he once heard
Parallelism: In whose blent air all our compulsions meet
Anaphora: A serious house on serious earth
Anadiplosis: to be more serious
Procatalepsis: Are recognized
Litotes: proper to grow wise in
Metabasis: And that much never can be obsolete
Amplification: Since someone will forever…
Metanoia: If only that so many dead lie round
Metaphor: robed as destinies.
Personification: A hunger in himself to be more serious
Hyperbaton: earth it is
Pleonasm: gravitating with it to this ground
Alliteration: And gravitating with it to this ground.
Parataxis: If only that so many dead lie round.
Climax: If only that so many dead lie round.
From an everyday beginning though with some rhetoric − the poem moves to studied exactness, the more striking because of the ‘artless’ flatlands from which it rises. Only they’re not artless, but a conscious strategy.